Six Traits of an Effective Reader

You may have heard of the "Six Traits of Writing", but here are the Six Traits of an Effective Reader:

• Building Context
• Decoding Conventions
• Comprehending
• Interpreting
• Synthesizing
• Evaluating

Sound vaguely familiar? They should since their based of the traditional Bloom's Taxonomy. They are the traits most associated with what "effective readers do". They are also the areas that teachers should be aware of to assist their students.

Building Context is developing the schema a student needs prior to reading a text. In other words, what are the elements of the text a student should be taught or learn prior to reading to enable comprehension?

Decoding Conventions are decoding words, fluency, learning vocabulary and decoding punctuation (when to pause, etc.).

Comprehending is the ability to retell, summarize/paraphrase, question, visualize, marking facts, and predicting.

Interpreting is the "reading between the lines" such as inferring/wondering, finding universal themes and or symbols.

Synthesizing is "reading beyond the lines" such as creating something new and making connections.

Evaluating is not "this sucks" but rather it is about being metacognitive and the ability to monitor oneself to determine the author's values and comparing to one's own values.

So now the question is how am I supposed to get students to do all this? Good question. There are a plethora of activities and methods both long and short that will elicit these traits from our students. Grade school teachers work on these skills everyday with a variety of texts. Content teachers, however, have to be aware of what their students need. You may have a classroom of students that are able to effectively evaluate text with ease, but is the text providing deep understanding?

In short, teachers should not just throw activities at students, but should have a purpose behind it. That is a discussion for another time.

I'll be posting quick formative assessments along with activities to assist students that may need these traits reinforced and further developed to tackle increasingly complex texts.